Sculpture Garden Installation: Lynn Basa, “Nomads”

Lynn Basa, Nomads, 2019 (detail). Mixed media, papier-mâché, wire, garden torches.

Nomads are a troupe of paintings migrating through Chicago on their way to becoming something else.

Lynn Basa’s paintings have started taking on lives of their own.  At first, she says, they would merely “whisper free associations to her inner voice” as she was working on them.  But then the voices became so distinct while making the works in her Happy Place series that she began to let the paintings speak for themselves and even included an interview with them in the exhibition catalogue. The group of paintings that followed, known as the Pods, “left the wall and spun a tale of being found in the woods where they were created by ‘animals with thumbs,’ creatures who had no knowledge of art history and were free of self-judgment,” as the artist describes it. Basa sees Nomads as the latest manifestation of this evolution. “With them, creative time overlaps with physical space and time.  These paintings need to exist, then leave, to make room for whatever is supposed to happen next.”

About the artist

LYNN BASA is a full-time artist with a studio in Chicago’s Avondale neighborhood.  She is a painter who also does public art commissions.  She is the founder of The Corner Project, a community-based practice focused on the people and places of Milwaukee Avenue between Kimball and Central Park.  She is the author of The Artist’s Guide to Public Art, which will be updated and reissued as a second edition in 2019.

Lynn Basa’s Nomads is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.